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Monday, October 1, 2012

A rock and a hard place... preparing for Trip 3

So 10/3 is just right around the corner, the 30-day mark from court when the court's decree is finalized in writing, which consequently means trip #3 is just around the corner. Before I get into that, I thought it important to fill everyone in with all the happens of the last month as the process hasn't let up just because we've had court.

One thing that I should put out there is Sweet Girl's region is unique among other regions in Eastern Europe as it requires 4 trips, not 3. The extra trip comes about from the passport application process which falls squarely between the courts decision and us being able to bring her home. See, Sweet Girl will travel to the United States as a foreign national and as such requires a passport from her country to travel on. In most regions, the task of applying for a passport can be delegated to your adoption facilitator through power of attorney so they may start the process while you're in the US and all you have to do is arrive to pick up the passport and your child, then return home. Not so in Sweet Girl's region, they require one of the parent's passports to start the application, thus requiring one of the parents to be there. The turn around time for a passport in her region is also much longer than other regions, several weeks instead of several days, making it difficult to wait in country and splitting up what would normally be 3 trips into 3rd and 4th trips.

On top of this, there is a secondary complicating factor, and that is visa's we use to travel on. Up to this point, we have been using 30-day, single entry, tourist visas which are pretty trivial to get through any travel agent, we happen to use one based out of Seattle. In Sweet Girl's country, visa's cannot be issued without first an invitation from inside her country, so that's the primary purpose of the travel agent, to facilitate the invitation from, for example, a foreign hotel, and to process the request through the consulate. However, we knew that in order to pick up her passport, we had to travel on an entirely different style visa, an adoption (aka business) visa. In order to get one of these, the invitation had to come from the adoption ministry in Sweet Girl's region and the travel agent could not help us here. So knowing all this, after we finished up court last trip, we had asked Vita to formally request our business visa invitation (something thats normally done later). The other thing about business visa's is they can be issued for multiple-entry across a longer than 30-day span. We had figured, if we got the invitation soon enough, we could travel on a single multiple-entry business visa for trips 3 and 4 and save about $500 over a single tourist for trip 3 and a single business for trip 4.

But there was also an alternative motive for going ahead and requesting our adoption visa invitations... we had full intentions of attempting to work the system, look for a loophole in the process, and combine the 3rd and 4th trips into one take-home trip. If we could get the passport process down to a few days, we could apply for it, wait, and pick it up, then bring her home all in a single trip. So, thanks to the Translate feature of Google Chrome, we spent a lot of time reading the information on the passport office's website and found a small chink in the armor. A clause that states passports could be expedited within 3-days with a letter from a foreign doctor stating emergency medical treatment in another country is necessary. Because of Sweet Girl's special needs classification, immediately when we got home, we worked with our pediatrician to craft a letter stating she needed to see our Sweet Girl as soon as possible. We then notarized and apostilled this letter and sent it on to Vita. Now something you should know about the passport offices in her country. Each region is more or less autonomous and is subject to its own interpretations of the laws (just like laws vary between states here). Because of this, we knew it was still a long shot, but it was only avenue to try to get her home sooner. We had discussed this idea with Vita, who agreed to call the passport office and ask so we said we would go ahead and prepare the doctor's letter for her to have. On the off chance this ploy worked, it was even more important to go ahead and get the visa invitation early so we could travel on the correct adoption visa if we were successful at combining the 3rd and 4th trips.

Now fast forward to the last week or so. Vita had previously called the passport office, but the supervisor was on vacation for several weeks so we had no answers there. As for the visa invitation, Vita had been calling every day and was told it was promised on 9/12, but we were almost two weeks after that date and still no invitations and nobody knew why. So now we were faced with a dilemma, 10/3 was fast approaching, the date we would be ready to apply for her passport, but still had no answers on expediting the passport or getting a business visa. Plane flights were getting more expensive by the hour and we knew we didn't want to delay trip 3 all all to apply for her passport later unless we were absolutely sure we could combine the trips and bring her home on that trip. All along, we said we wouldn't make her wait longer than necessary because of money or paperwork, we'd find a way. Also, due to the timing of this work trip and Jessica's work schedule, it was not a great week for her to travel unless we would be picking her up. And since the passport office only requires one parent to apply for the passport, we decided that I would go solo unless we were combining the trips. So we made a judgement call and went ahead and booked my flight for 10/2 - 10/6 with no idea about visa's or whether the passport office would honor our doctors letter and request to expedite.

Because the travel dates had already been set, this gave us a hard deadline for when we must apply for a visa... even with paying expedite fees, our travel agent in Seattle had to have all information in hand by 9:00am Thurs morning in order to pick up the visa Fri and have it overnighted for Sat delivery back to us. But we still didn't know what type of visa. So we filled out two applications, one for tourist and one for business and packaged them up along with my passport and mailed them to Seattle with instructions that we would provide at the last possible moment which application to submit to the consulate. Then Wed we received good news, our business invitations had been granted and Vita sent us scanned copies. But along with this came a bit of bad news, the passport office had rejected our request to expedite the passport so there would be no combining the trips, but having me travel on a multiple entry business visa would still save us money and give me the option of remaining in country if for some reason they said the passport would only take a few days when I dropped it off. We thought we were set with the visa. However, the consulate uses an online computer system to look up the invitations, and even though they had been issued, it hadn't yet appeared in the computer system so we were still without luck... we had til 9:00am the following day to hope the computer system would get updated. We went ahead and started the process to get a tourist invitation as a backup plan. Then Thurs and our 9:00am deadline comes and its still not in the system, we make the call to go with a traditional tourist visa. A couple hours pass and I get a call from our travel agent, there has been a computer glitch and our tourist invitation is also not in the system, the consulate (in Seattle) won't be able to have the visa processed until Mon morning (the day before I leave) and its too late to re-process on our business invitation that did end up showing in the computer system about lunch time. :frustrating:

So we've come up with the following hail-mary play... I will stick to my original plan of flying out from Charlotte-Douglas airport tomorrow at 11:00am. I will be going solo to apply for our Sweet Girl's passport while Jessica remains behind to watch the twins and work. My visa should be ready this morning in Seattle where our travel agent will FedEx it priority overnight to the Charlotte-Douglas airport to arrive tomorrow (the day I leave). So I will leave my house tomorrow, heading to the airport with no passport. I need to find the FedEx terminal there, attempt to pick up my priority package held there before heading over to the passenger terminal. If all goes well, I should make it out of the country on time, crisis averted... but we have basically lost all margin for error now.

Since this is a short solo trip, pretty much for the sole purpose of going is to the passport office to apply for her passport before turning around and coming home, I won't have much opportunity to see our Sweet Girl, though I hope to at least see her once or twice... look for the short blog entries for trip 3 in the coming days. If all goes well, Jessica and I will be returning in late October one last time to pick up our Sweet Girl and bring her home.... for good!

3 comments:

well, good news... we got confirmation the visa was issued and picked up by our travel agency. now fedex just has to do their thing and get it from seattle to charlotte by tomorrow morning and I'll be set!